I am finishing up my senior project for school and I am having problems thinking of answers to a couple of questions. They are asking about jobs and non paid activities that will help me build up a resume for the career I want to pursue after high school. The problem I'm having is that I imagine that few jobs that don't involve actual programming are going to help qualify me for a video game programming job. As far as unpaid activities go I don't have a guess.

If you could, please list a few ideas for me to write about.

The questions are as follows:

"Think of three jobs you should try to get to build skills related to your career objective. Tell how each is related to your potential career."

"Think of three unpaid activities you should try to build skills related to your career objective. Tell how each would relate to your career and strengthen your resume."

Are these jobs to work up to your dream job? Or jobs to work up to an entry level position in your desired field?

If it's the latter, then that's a bit more difficult. One such position that I personally held was a Java teaching assistant at university. I assisted the professor in lecturing (when he was away or sick) held office hours to help students with their work and graded assignments. While I didn't realise it at first, I was actually learning useful code review skills, mentoring skills, communication skills, and knowledge transfer skills which are applicable to my current job (Gameplay animation software engineer).

If it's the former, this is a bit easier. Generally a dream job isn't "game programmer", but somethine more specific with higher qualifications. Such as Animation Lead Software Engineer, or Lead Rendering Engineer, or lead AI engineer, or even CTO (chief technical officer in charge of driving technology planning for the whole company). If this is the case, it would be jobs such as junior programmer, gameplay generalist programmer, domain expert programmer (ai, animation, rendering, online, etc.). The job titles would be different from company to company, but they would be something like that.

Unpaid activities could include, as Servant suggested, working on open source projects, working on hobby projects, reading domain relevant books (non-course related). All stuff that continues to be valuable to do even upon getting the job you want.

Cardinal, I believe I was looking for something to aim for an entry level position. Mostly because I don't know enough about the different jobs yet to really know which is best for me. I think I would enjoy something related to the realism of the game, at least for the games that are supposed to be realistic. I imagine they have programmers that have to job of making the physics within the game realistic. For example if I were hired to work on a driving game I would like to have a job related to making the driving as realistic as possible.